by Daria Bongiorni

It’s movie marathon day: black and white

A movie marathon about black and white movies is a must, if you don’t like black and white, you don’t like cinema. My opinion. But there is something so romantic and elegant in the black and white movies, even when they talk about a crime. It seems that they are set in a cocoon-like world.
Not only old movies are in black and white but now this became only a stylistic choice: colours make you express a lot more things but the dualism of two colours create a specific and particular space imbued with different meanings.

I chose 2 epic old movies and 1 “new” (meaning that it was made when colours were fully used) particular film:

Casablanca, 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. This is one of the classical film you have to watch at least once in your life. This is a sentimental drama with one of the most fascinating Hollywood men (even if he had only one facial expression, maybe two). A lot of quotes from this movie are used in real life: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship“, “We’ll always have Paris” and many more. It was censored a lot during Fascism, a lot of dialogues against Italian dictatorship were changed, maybe this is way I love to watch it in English so much. All this little details have to make you think the importance of this movie IRL.

Psyco, 1960, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. I think that maybe the 90% of the World population saw this movie. If you are in that 10% shame on you! This is the most famous Hitchcock movie, it’s so important that it generated 3 sequels, one spin-off and a remake. Inspired by Ed Gein’s life, a murderer, this noir/thriller film has a lot to talk about, from the art quotes to the director’s magnificent technical choices.

Manhattan, 1979, directed by Woody Allen, with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. This is a sentimental comedy with the famous jewish touch of Allen. He chose to make this movie in black and white to make Manhattan the real main character of the story, as it is a real person, even if this film talk about the decline of the society of the town. He remembered all those movies he watched when he was a child and this is how he sees Manhattan in his head.

What do you think about these movies? Have you got some black and white movies you want to talk me about?